Utopia or unfulfilled promise

Opinions today, about the efficacy of the United Nations, stand divided and opposed. There are some who think that the United Nations is irrelevant, ineffective and largely useless "debating society."
Others believe it has become, sometimes willing and often unwilling, legitimising instrument in the hands of the more aggressive and larger countries and is helping in establishing a new kind of imperialism around the world. And there are still others, mainly from the larger countries, who feel that it is an ineffective bureaucracy that is often a hindrance in the way of the bigger nations in achieving their objectives and sometimes even the objectives of "justice and peace" as the larger countries perceive them.
These debates have become a lot more intense since 9/11 and the decisions, by some countries, to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. How are the United Nations and the community of sovereign states that form the United Nations going to address these concerns (and a reform effort is on-going currently), and how they are going to resolve them will determine the future of the United Nations for sure, but it will also determine what the new "world order" is going to look like.
In these times it might not be a bad idea to reflect back on some of the debates that were going on when the United Nations was formed, to see what the hopes then were: when we do not learn from history, we are condemned to repeat the same mistakes.
The birth of the United Nations happened at the end of the Second World War. It was a time of hope and dreams: the war had ended but the bitter lessons of the war were still very fresh; Nazism has been defeated, overt colonialism was in retreat and it was clear that the world was going to see many new nations very soon. There was a feeling, shared by many, that the world should do its best to avoid the kind of conflict it had just barely survived. The Atlantic Charter, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941, had already acknowledged that "...they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them."
The United Nations was seen, by many, as a way of making the hope of a better world a reality. Professor Manu Bhagavan of Hunter College, City University of New York, has, in a recent paper titled A New Hope: India the United Nations and the Making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, convincingly shown that many people, among them Gandhi as well as Nehru, were hopeful that the United Nations would live up to the promise of creating a better world. In fact, they even had a fairly worked out idea of what some of the governance related contours of this better world would be like.
The August 8, 1942 Bombay "Quit India" Declaration of the Congress had already stated that they saw the future of the world in a "federation of free nations" where the federation would ensure the freedom of its constituent nations, prevent aggression and exploitation by one nation of another, protect national minorities, ensure advancement of backward areas and people, and work towards pooling of world's resources for the common good. In fact it was also envisaged that only the federation would have a police force or army to ensure peace across the federation while the constituent sovereign states would disarm voluntarily and not keep standing armies.